«At the Centro Tra Noi, she would set up her stall on Sundays to display her handiwork, and it was always a chance for me to have a chat, to piece back together the threads that emigration had broken, through the sharing of lived experience».
The speaker is Alicia Lopes Araújo, an Italian journalist born in Cape Verde who has recently begun invaluable work collecting oral histories to reconstruct a story that deserves to be preserved. This year marks sixty years since Italy's first large-scale migration wave began: in 1963, Cape Verdean women started arriving in Rome, launching a chapter that teaches us much about recognizing the other and mutual enrichment. Though marked by suffering and exploitation, the migration story from the African archipelago is, on balance, a positive one—proof that integration between a sending community and a receiving community is possible. Yet it is also a story shadowed by fragility, hardship, and mental illness. These are aspects that, Araújo continues, «return in the accounts of these pioneers, even as it emerges that on many occasions these women received support and a listening ear».
The girl at the stall mentioned above is Agata, who has schizophrenia. For decades, she has tried to mend her fractured life through embroidery and crochet. «She arrived in Rome very young, with a natural elegance, and she would tell me proudly that her employers said she could have been a model. Her first serious crisis came one summer in Cortina, where she was staying with the family she worked for. Hospitalized at a hospital near the Austrian border, she was able to rely during those months on visits from her Cape Verdean friends (also in Cortina for work), who, determined not to leave her alone, faced down the stern border police. The diagnosis of schizophrenia would come much later; after various hospitalizations at San Camillo Forlanini (where I visited her as a teenager with my mother), she was first taken in by a fellow countrywoman and then by a group home, thanks to support from the Tra Noi movement» (founded in the 1970s in Rome to support migrant girls). Over the years, Agata has managed to support herself through the sale of her needlework.
«Having myself lived the immigrant's experience from childhood,» Araújo continues, «I have encountered stories of extreme loneliness, unfulfilled expectations, social exclusion, the absence of family and emotional ties; lives cornered by suffering that led to physical ailments and mental distress. Maria, Georgina, Giulietta, Agata deserve to be told, because their stories are woven through with solidarity and generosity».
Maria, for instance, has been living at Termini for many years. There, armed with a folding chair so she can talk comfortably, Antonita—a Cape Verdean psychotherapist who came to Rome decades ago for work—visits her regularly. On Wednesdays, the appointment moves to Casal Palocco park with Georgina, bringing her lunch; but since Georgina is particular, the canja (traditional Cape Verdean soup) must be beef—not tuna or chicken, because «that's for the poor». Then there is Giulietta, who fell into depression and for a long time could count on support from her former Italian partner, who left her the house and guaranteed her 500 euros a month until her social pension arrived.
Emigration is not for everyone, goes a Cape Verdean proverb. «Many women suffered in unspeakable ways, showing severe mental illnesses»: persecution complexes, panic attacks, nervous breakdowns, identity crises, maladjustment and depersonalization (one of the most common symptoms among migrants)—all conditions studied by ethnopsychiatry. «Some of these women are still in Italy, others were sent back to Cape Verde, still others, though they wanted to stay, gave up because the archipelago offered no health care or medical treatment».
«Separation, a journey into the unknown, arrival in the destination country: these factors reshape a migrant woman's life and upset so many things. Of course there is no single migration story, but there are common threads in journeys that are at once geographic, mental, and emotional. The reasons for emigrating and the first impact with the host country can shape the process of redefining one's life project. Not everyone comes out victorious; not everyone can work through the grief of separation, reshape the meaning of their own existence».
Stories from then and now. Going back to the 1960s, Araújo tells us of Rosa, hospitalized at Santa Maria della Pietà. «She had received her discharge papers from the psychiatric hospital three months earlier, but they would not let her leave. Lea Manzone, a social worker and one of the first Italian girls at Tra Noi, went to speak with the doctor and discovered he opposed her release because Rosa had nowhere to go. The Portuguese consulate (Cape Verde didn't become independent until 1975) was willing to take responsibility, but only on the condition that she be sent back home: yet before boarding a plane, Rosa needed a period of adjustment after hospitalization». There was another substantial problem. «At Santa Maria they had not been able to reach a clear diagnosis: since they did not know Rosa's background, they could not properly assess her». Things became clear not long after: in the group home she had a relapse—it wasn't maladjustment but schizophrenia.
Generally speaking, Araújo continues, «there was profound pain. Often these women had serious hysterical crises at Tra Noi around 6 or 7 on Sunday evenings: as the moment approached to return to work, some would collapse to the floor. They were almost always the same women, the most fragile: their maladjustment was so severe it became uncontainable. Worried, Manzone spoke with a psychiatrist at Gemelli. "I wish I could witness these crises, because we only study them in books; we have never actually seen them," he said».
The doctor at Santa Maria della Pietà, the psychiatrist at Gemelli: what strikes us is this earlier awareness among Italian medicine of grappling with something unknown. And today's journalist determined to weave together this story of halting but achieved integration: what strikes us is the desire to listen and find solutions together. Because addressing mental distress and fragility requires above all understanding the person.